Two Paths Leading Backwards

Let me suggest that it is impossible to have just one bad political party for any length of time. If you had a good party and a bad party, everyone would vote for the good party and the bad party would be forced to be competitive if it wanted to survive. The good party would push the dividing line further towards the bad party, forcing the weaker of the two to incorporate stances held by the winning party. At some point, the dividing line would land roughly halfway between the will of the people.

One political party can move the line left or right, but it takes both of them, one standing at either end, to raise or lower the bar. What you are witnessing now is a limbo contest of epic proportions.

I used to vote for Democrats, not because they were what I wanted but because they were at least moving forward. As someone who defined himself as progressive, that was the logical choice. Or at least the justifiable compromise. But with the advent of Bill Clinton, it was pretty obvious that they were no longer even standing still, they were going backwards. All right, it wasn’t so obvious to me, since I voted for the man, at least the first time around. But doing so made me feel cheap and used the morning after, an effect he had on a few others, I imagine. I don’t remember the particular incident, but I truly remember in the first week after him becoming president, the regret sinking in. Sure, presidents once they’ve transitioned from candidate to office always disappoint, but this one really made me realize I had to change my behavior.

When someone can no longer identify with the party they have voted for all their lives, they typically switch to the other, but that is not a viable option in this case. Though Democrats have ceased to be Democrats and moved way further to the right, Republicans are still in the lead and running as if the devil himself was trying to overtake them.

You see, it doesn’t matter which side of the line you are on so much as where the line is. And if someone keeps dragging the line to the right and you follow along but do not cross it, that doesn’t make you a progressive. The very fact that you follow every time the line is positioned further to the right indicates you are not an answer nor an opposition.

But enough of the x axis, it is the y axis I’m more interested in. And the bar has been falling. It is continuing to fall. It is in the negatives now, retreating with no signs of abatement. And while each party is going backwards in its own special way, they are both doing so in tandem.

Conservatives are attempting to go back to the way it (never was but they believe it) used to be, for white and white-identifying people. Cultural myths are comforting, because they are both idyllic and simplistic. They want to go back to Mayberry, they want the little town that is not influenced by the outside world that is so corrupting (and different). They want a world that is black and white. Mostly white.

There would be a few modifications to the Mayberry blueprint, however. For example, the first time Sheriff Andy Taylor tried to take the bullets away from Barney’s gun, they’d call in the NRA and have him driven out of town, to be replaced by David Clarke or Joe Arpaio.

Better yet, the new sheriff would be played by Charles Bronson, and each episode he’d be sure to pop a cap in someone’s ass. Tax payers supporting Otis’ life of addiction? A bullet’s cheaper than the cost of putting him up for the night (unless, of course, the jail was privatized, in which case Otis’ stay would be indefinite).

But it would be justice, only the bad guys would get hurt. Of course, the definition of bad guys would be very liberal, encompassing anyone who was not a conservative.

Conservatives want to venerate and preserve the past, no matter how crappy it might have been for many Americans. Japanese Americans, African Americans, migrants in general. It was pretty bad for poor whites ignorant of their history too, but that’s a stratum of society that seems to repeat the same mistakes over and over. At any rate, conservatives want to keep the memory of America’s glorious past alive, they just don’t want to think critically about it or discuss it. It is not history they wish to remember, it is myth. But one has to wonder how people who cannot face the complexity and unpleasant truth of the past see the present for what it is. If you cannot see the racism in the past, what makes anyone think you see it for what it is now?

Hard work is what built this nation, that’s the rallying cry of the conservatives, neglecting to mention whose sweat and labor that was. It was the labor of immigrants and slaves, of children as young as 8 working 60-hour weeks as breaker boys, sometimes losing their limbs and even their lives to the dangerous machinery they were more familiar with than their own beds.

Work hard and don’t expect to be given anything. That’s the advice I would give to my child if I were a wealthy capitalist. Work hard and don’t expect to be given anything. That’s the advice I would give to my employees if I were a wealthy capitalist too, but for entirely different reasons.

Conservatives want to go back to the era of fewer restrictions for business, without ever looking back at that era and the misery created by it. The thinking of conservatives is that they are going to succeed because they are hard-working and things will work out for them. They figure since they were the one sperm out of a million that fertilized the egg that they are special, not realizing everyone alive was created that way.

If conservatives have regressed into a sort of tribalism, then liberals have regressed into infantilism. They don’t want to build mass movements to take power into their own hands, they want Daddy Deep State to make the Big Bad Trump-Monster go away. They want Mommy Media to hold them in her arms and tell them she’ll keep them safe from the Russian hackers under their bed.

Never in my life have I experienced a doe-eyed child whole-heartedly swallow a story an authority figure has told them the way liberals have the Russian hacking story. And I’ve been around to witness the Benghazi conspiracy theories.

The liberals believe because they want to believe. No, they believe because they need to believe. They need to believe that our nation has not come to this, even though it has quite clearly come to this. They need to believe that Donald Trump was not at the end of the road we’ve been walking for a generation and more. DAMN IT ALL, ALL WE HAD TO DO WAS ELECT HILLARY AND EVERYTHING WOULD HAVE BEEN LIKE IT USED TO BE!!! And how it used to be was pretty good for those not losing their jobs, watching their paychecks get stretched further and further, or being incarcerated for minor drug offences. Or dying on foreign soil.

Liberals are looking for a quick fix to make life the way it was before. Not a hundred years ago, just last year. Somehow the idea that the present flowed logically from yesterday doesn’t seem to occur to them. There was no natural progression from the world they helped shape to the reality they now experience. Trump came out of nowhere, a deus ex machina to a cheaply written novel. It is a story involving one-dimensional villains wearing black but always white. If only there was a Condoleezza Rice or Collen Powell to stand up for truth, justice and the American way.

We needed a villain to blame, since we weren’t in the mood for looking in the mirror. Blaming terrorists was getting old, and more than a little awkward since Hillary was helping them overthrow nations. Besides, it’s politically incorrect to blame people of Middle East descent for all that has gone wrong, though oddly enough it seemed permissible to kill them and take their oil to fuel our SUVs. We needed to tie Donald Trump to the most reprehensible people imaginable, those forces that from our earliest memories were the symbols of all that is evil in the world. Let’s see, who could we get?

Putin! Yes, the leader of the Evil Empire.

Never mind that Russia is not the Soviet Union and Evil Empire was Ronald Reagan’s term, not one those on the left ever used. Ronald Reagan and Joseph McCarthy. The Republicans liberals used to hate are their friends now, at least those who are willing to dis on Trump. And while we’re dipping into the well of our deepest subconscious stereotypes, let’s add fascists to the list. Never mind the mixed metaphor, never mind the fact that there is nothing so abominable in the collective memory of Russians as fascism or Nazism. Never mind that the U.S. is supporting far-right regimes on Russia’s borders.

And so liberals simplified the narrative enough that they need not do anything beyond hate everyone that disagrees with them as they await further instructions from anonymous sources from intelligence agencies we’ve never heard of.

And where are the adults in all of this? At the margins, the far end of the right and the left who seem to have more in common with each other than they do with those closest to them. They sit on the margins not because they are that distant from what the majority of Americans want so much as they are there because the story they tell is not the one the mainstream media wants. At the edges sit those who 40 years ago would have been mainstream Democrats and Republicans, but have been kicked to the curb by a cancer that has grown in between them. It is a cancer that both margins see clearly, though each from its particular vantage point. The right sees a bloated government trampling on the rights of the individual, while the left sees bloated corporate power that needs to be reined in. But that bloated cancer in the middle is what is paying the big money to get those in the middle elected, those politicians willing to allow that festering bag of corruption into the hallowed halls of our government.

Thus there is no dividing line between the two parties anymore, not in any true sense. They have both been absorbed by that pulsating evil at the center of our society, the big money that controls the big government. To squabble about the minor differences as seen from the left perspective or the right perspective is foolish.

And thus we have two paths, both leading downward through their unrealistic desire to revert rather than advance. But even while there are differences in the two political approaches of the liberals and conservatives, there are many similarities. Both have chosen hatred, division and self-delusion as their responses to the problems we now face. The irony being that the most dangerous problems we now face are hatred, division and self-delusion.